Saturday, August 7, 2010

R.I.P. Tony Judt

Tony Judt, author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, died today of Lou Gehrig's disease, at age 62. Before Postwar, I'd skipped Judt's essays in The New York Review of Books, thinking him a typical centrist liberal wonk. My mistake. I picked up Postwar while I was working on a chapter of my book The Family, about the role of American fundamentalists in the rehabilitation of Nazis. My interest, then, was limited to a small piece of Judt's book; really, I was simply hoping to find a generalist's account of the Adenauer government. But what I found was a vigorously argued, well-paced, deeply engaged history that picked me up and carried well beyond Germany. I'm usually not a fan of doorstop continental histories, but Judt's book is, in one sense, less than that, and thus more. Judt eschewed the omniscient authority of the all-powerful historian for the greater passion -- and, to me, persuasiveness -- of the essayist. It's a valuable book. And since then, I've read Judt's NYRB essays, including his moving memoir, dictated in his dying days, which begins here.

AKA

The Family, 2008: Six months on the NYT bestseller list. Enabled me to buy a used Nissan Sentra from my step-mother-in-law.

C Street, 2010: This book prompted Ugandan anti-gay would-be genocidaire David Bahati to accuse me of being in a gay couple with Rachel Maddow. Excerpts won awards, among them one named for Molly Ivins -- a check plus a giant beer stein.

Sweet Heaven When I Die, 2011. The publisher proposed as a title Sweet Fuck All, Colorado, but then they got cold feet. A couple of reviewers compared me to Joan Didion, which gave me a celebratory migraine.

Radiant Truths, an anthology of literary journalism.

With Peter Manseau, I made a book called Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible, 2004.

With the staff of KillingTheBuddha.com, I made a book called Believer, Beware, 2009.

I teach mutant journalism at Dartmouth College, and I'm a contributing editor for Harper's, Rolling Stone, & Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2015 I won a National Magazine Award for my GQ article "Inside the Iron Closet."